Three Amigos
In agile software development, the Three Amigos is the practice of a business, a development and a testing perspective reviewing a user story together before work starts. The three talk through what the story means, its rules and its edge cases, and leave with a shared understanding and examples they can turn into acceptance criteria.
The longer version
The three views ask different questions of the same story. The business view asks what problem it solves and what a good outcome looks like. The development view asks how it could be built and what it depends on. The testing view asks what could go wrong and how anyone would know it works. Hearing all three before the work starts catches a mismatch while it still costs a conversation.
Three perspectives need not mean three people. A product owner, a developer and a tester is the usual line-up, a designer or an analyst sometimes joins, and one person may hold two views. George Dinwiddie is credited with the name. The session is short and on one story, held when the story is close enough to be built soon.
The outputs are concrete: agreed acceptance criteria, examples of the rules in action, a list of open questions and a view on whether the story is small enough. Example mapping is a common way to structure the conversation, and the examples are often written as Given/When/Then scenarios. A story that has been through one is well placed to meet a team's definition of ready.
Common questions
Who are the Three Amigos in agile?
The Three Amigos are three perspectives, the business, development and testing, usually carried by a product owner, a developer and a tester. The name counts viewpoints, so the headcount can differ, and a designer or analyst may join.
When should a Three Amigos session happen?
A session belongs before a story enters a sprint, when it is close enough to be built soon that the answers will still be fresh. Holding it too early wastes the detail, and holding it during the sprint turns questions into delays.
How long does a Three Amigos session take?
Each team sets its own timebox, since the practice has no standard length, and many hold several brief sessions a week during refinement instead of one long meeting. A conversation that keeps running past its timebox has usually turned into designing the solution, which the developers can finish without the other two views.
Is Three Amigos part of Scrum?
The Scrum Guide does not mention it. Three Amigos is a team practice, associated with behaviour-driven development and specification by example, and it fits into backlog refinement.
What comes out of a Three Amigos session?
A session produces agreed acceptance criteria, concrete examples of the rules, a list of open questions with owners, and a decision on whether the story is small and clear enough to take into a sprint or needs splitting.
Bug reports that arrive ready to triage.
Collect replay, console, network and browser context with the Free plan.